Exhibitions and Events
What's on at the County Museum, Shugborough?|||
What's on across Staffordshire?|||
To find out about some of the highlights of previous exhibitions, click the subjects on the navigation menu bar.
Planning a visit and need to think about getting around? Download the plans of the Ground Floor| and First Floor| galleries at the County Museum, Shugborough or get directions and ticket information from the Shugborough website|. A land train and minibus run from the car park to the main site and mobility scooters can be obtained from the main ticket office.
New Community Galleries, Staffordshire County Museum
Play
There is something for the whole family in our bright and magical new gallery. New displays of toys and games from the County Museum collection and fun and exciting activities have been created with the help from children at Coton Green Primary School, Tamworth.
What toys do you remember from your childhood? Can you spot any of them in the ‘Play’ gallery?
Clothes
We all wear clothes. Whether we follow fashion or not, clothes can reveal a lot about us. The changing displays in this gallery use historic clothes in the County Museum collections to explore the background of today’s clothes, and how fashions have changed over time.
This year’s display explores the theme of celebrations through a display of wedding dresses from the museum collection. The dresses on display include an 1860s crinoline, a 1970s nylon dress and a wedding sari.
You can decide whether you are 'plain' or 'fancy' by taking part in our Cloth Quiz, have a go at trying on some wedding hats or make fabric bunting to decorate your very own celebration!
Featured in our Community Case - students from Staffordshire University’s BA (Hons) History course have selected items from the museum collections which reflect different types of celebrations, including weddings, Christenings and birthdays.
Health
Come and find out about health care in the past in our new ‘Health’ gallery. Discover some of the changes in technology from strapping patients to the operating table to the development of anaesthetics.
Try your hand at being a dentist; could you treat someone’s teeth by looking in a mirror? Sort the facts from the fiction in our True False Teeth quiz or prescribe your own ’Horrible Remedy’ to your friends and family!
New for 2012 - A Falklands Tale
2012 marks the 30th Anniversary of the Falklands Conflict between Britain and Argentina. On 11th July 1982, Captain Margaret Barclay of the Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps arrived in the Falklands with 2 Field Hospital after an 8000 mile voyage. Captain Barclay worked as a Theatre Sister at the hospital in Port Stanley, treating sick and injured military personnel for six months. Discover more about her life in the Falklands through the objects she took with her.
Shoes
Stafford and Stone were major boot and shoemaking centres. Explore the area’s proud shoemaking heritage through exciting activities, archive film and displays featuring the County Museum’s important collections of boots and shoes. You can find out how to be a ‘clicker’, design your own footwear and decide whether your shoes are plain or fancy.
Did you know that Evo-stik and Dorman’s diesels owed their success to shoes? Find out more about shoes and the other industries which grew up around the boot and shoemaking industry in Staffordshire at our new ‘Heart and Sole’ website|.
Featured in our Community Case – one of our museum volunteers has developed a display of items from Universal Grinding Wheel Ltd, a Stafford based company that manufactured abrasive grinding wheels used in the shoe industry. The display explores some of the products made by the company and the sport and social life of the employees.
Knowing Their Place
How do we know what a servant's working life was like? What do we use to find out what was used by maids in the laundry and kitchen in the 1870s?
Using original objects, costume, documents, photographs and oral history recordings, this exhibition shows how we have been able to reconstruct the servants' lives at 19th century Shugborough.
The Hayward Puppet Collection
The puppets on display are part of a large puppet collection drawn together over many years by Mr Douglas Hayward. A lifetime's work has gone into developing the collection to its present size and scope - over 300 puppets of all varieties and from all over the world, dating back to the early 1800s. The collection, which was formerly on display at the Puppet Theatre Museum in Abbots Bromley, was kindly donated to Shugborough in 1994.
Alongside some of the figures used by Waldo Lanchester and Wallace Peat's Wessex Puppets are examples of the whole puppet family including marionettes and shadow, rod and glove puppets - and, of course, there would be no show without Mr Punch!
A Brief History of Puppets
Records show that puppets, used both as playthings and as religious ceremonial items, were already evident thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, Greece and China. However, in this country, it is thought that puppets were first introduced in the wake of the Roman invasion of Britain in AD43. Little more is known of the development of puppets until the Middle Ages when strolling players were granted licenses to perform puppet 'shows' in some of the larger towns.
By the 17th and 18th centuries, puppetry was in its heyday in Britain. In one of his diaries in 1662, Samuel Pepys refers to a performance of the infamous puppet character 'Mr Punch' who had arrived from Italy in the years following the restoration of Charles the Second in 1660.
During the 18th century, puppet shows became a regular feature of popular entertainment - often taking their themes from current plays, political events, popular stories and biblical legends.
Puppet shows, especially those involving Punch and Judy characters, continued as a popular form of entertainment at fairs and at the seaside well into the 19th century. However by the 1900s, and with the advent of the 'moving picture', puppet shows gradually declined in popularity.
During the 1920s and beyond two famous puppeteers, Waldo Lanchester and Wallace Peat worked with their various puppet theatre companies to re-generate British Puppetry. Peat's Wessex Puppets were among the first glove puppets to be televised by the newly formed BBC in 1937. Since then puppets have become a regular form of television entertainment - from Muffin the Mule and the Woodentops to Thunderbirds and Spitting Image.
Museum on the Move
Museum on the Move is an interactive, multi sensory mobile museum exhibition. Click here||| to find out more about it - and how you can arrange a visit!
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